Alexandra Hospital (AH) team has rolled out a series of four health education workshops under its A-LIFE! (Approaches to Lifestyle Intervention for Everyone) programme at Queenstown Community Centre, in partnership with Active Ageing Committee. Organised by AH’s Relate, Integrate, Connect and Engage (RICE) Community Engagement team, together with Dietitians, Pharmacists, Physiotherapists and Occupational Therapists from AH, the programme focuses on healthy eating, exercising and lifestyle modification, to help reduce the risk of chronic diseases.

About 30 participants were present at the first workshop, the youngest being 54 and the oldest a spritely lady at 84. Miss Shirley Lau, 61, a nearby resident and participant from Active Ageing said, “These workshops are useful because of the increasing awareness of the importance of keeping healthy and ageing well. I feel more guided and motivated to take charge of my health.” There will be a follow- up session with the participants after the run to understand how much knowledge was retained and applied through.

Ms Catherine Koh, AH’s Principal Dietitian said, “We would like to positively impact the health of the individual and the community as a whole, help them understand their health risks and be aware of the impact of lifestyle changes in the long term. We are also stressing the importance of self-monitoring their own health status, over time. From among the participants, we also hope to develop Health Leaders within the cohort to spread the health messages to friends in their own circles. A ‘Train the trainer’ program (currently in the development phase) will be implemented to empower Health Leaders within the Queenstown community to be trained in inculcating health messages throughout the community. This is to allow the community to safeguard the health of their own community, where our long term vision will be to develop Queenstown into a healthy community, with reduced incidence of chronic diseases.

Mr Gopal Kanapatty PBM, Chairman of the Queenstown Active Ageing Committee said, “It is important to provide easy access to residents on health empowerment and we have attracted participants from as far as Clementi and Jurong East in similar efforts. Our strategy is to reach out to older residents and also increasingly, those just hitting 40 in the heartlands, so as to make it more convenient for them to access preventive healthcare services.”

This is the fourth such A-LIFE series, with previous sessions organised with Stirling View Zone Resident Committee, Strathmore Avenue Zone Resident Committee and Stirling Neighbourhood Committee.

As part of AH’s continuous efforts to build a healthier Queenstown district, its RICE Community Engagement team also works with other community partners such as St Andrew’s Nursing Home, Silver Generation Office, FaithActs, Social Service Office@Queenstown, to name a few.

Last year the hospital reached out to over 70 guests from 20 different organisations comprising of community partners, voluntary welfare organisations, General Practitioners (GPs) and polyclinics to introduce our new care models and to lobby for strong support to strengthen the network of healthcare delivery in the community.

The hospital inked an MOU with St Andrew’s Nursing Home (SANH) at this session, to develop care paths and allow greater accessibility to services in the Queenstown area with a focus on enhancing the quality of care for residents at the nursing home. Under this initiative, AH nurses and doctors spend time at the nursing home to share knowledge and skills to provide better care for patients. The exposure also allows AH and SANH to build a stronger partnership, and to develop and pilot new care models.

RICE also reaches out to GPs in the Queenstown area to share hospital practices by the way of Continuing Medical Education (CME) topics, and more importantly, to network and foster stronger ties with the primary care partners in this area. It is hoped that through this network, patients will have better and more direct access to services that the hospital offers, thereby reducing waiting time for patients.

Moving forward, the hospital hopes to run more community programmes to identify and address the unmet needs in our community.